Powerful things are possible when Advancement Offices and student programming come together. At the Pennington School, this partnership through the Horizon Experience, has provided us the opportunity to navigate the opportunities and challenges of mentorship, to build engagement through alumni and parent participation in on-campus programming, and to co-create experiences that help our seniors reflect on the importance of their high school experience and transition into becoming supportive alumni.

Working with alumni and parents presents both challenges and opportunities. While it can be very fruitful, it also requires careful planning and coordination to be beneficial for students, alumni, and parents. The key is setting the right expectations. During this session, we will discuss how each engagement opportunity can be presented so that it is a good fit for all parties. Conversations about hosting a student is critical because we don’t always have a match for each volunteer. Volunteers coming to campus who are business professionals leading a discussion can have work emergencies arise disrupting plans and backup programming is necessary. Fortunately, the use of zoom can assist in these situations, as well as provide an opportunity to engage alumni who are dynamic but not local and their involvement adds value.

Over the last five years, Collegiate School in New York City has made institutional decisions that have been challenging for its alumni community to accept: in 2018, it left its home of 125 years, where alumni "grew up," for a gleaming new building a mile away; and, this past year, it redesigned its long-serving mascot. Add to these the limitations on in-person events imposed by the pandemic, some unwanted publicity, and the way that all independent schools have been caught in the middle of the culture wars, and the result is disruption to the usual means of alumni engagement. In this session, we will discuss we were able to maintain and expand our engagement with alumni through creative programming and by taking advantage of the unique strengths of Collegiate's alumni community.

In this strategic planning session, you will learn how to build projects that lead to big picture deliverables. The session will include facilitated activities that walk you through how to:
-think outside the box to increase alumni engagement
-develop a wide range of projects to deliver on these visions
-prioritize these projects to make manageable yet meaningful advancements towards your long term goals
-identify valuable talking points and partnerships outside of your advancement and development teams to enhance your project values and alumni experiences.
Some of these activities include identifying your stakeholder's key emotional and rational decision making needs, project sequencing: what needs to come first for there to be the most success, and ruthless prioritization: with limited resources, what is realistic to accomplish?
By the end of the session, you will have strategic activities and worksheets to bring back to your school to review as well as a variety of starter ideas from collaboration during the session itself.